Dungeons & Dragons

Welcome friends, to the wonderful world of Dungeons and Dragons.Now I am by no means an expert, but as I stumble along with the process of learning how to be a Dungeon Master I thought I could bring you all with me. No knowledge of D&D will be required to follow with the blog series, I’ll be explaining the basics as we go as well as relating the story as decided by the players.

So let us start with Dungeons and Dragons 101.D&D is a role playing game, you create a character following the game rules where you stats are often decided by dice rolls. These stats determine your skills, your base stats are as follows.

StrengthDexterityConstitutionIntelligenceWisdomCharisma

The numbers for these stats, and the subsequent skills like swim or bluff, along with dice rolls determine how successful you are at doing whatever it is you want to do. This is where the fun is, any situation the Dungeon Master can throw at you can potentially be talked out of, fought out of, run away from or teleported to another dimension.Depending on the party playing.The Dungeon Master, in this case me, sets the scenario, chooses the enemies, and is subsequently either punishing the party or being punished by the party.

The rules are malleable, some Dungeon Masters play strictly to the letter of it with players who can build a character maximizing every possibility within the rules. Others will let some things slide in favour of the story, although usually some rules will always stay in place. A game isn’t fun if there isn’t some grounding that you can rely on.

The only other thing to keep in mind is different editions, the rules of D&D change with each new edition. Edition 3.5 is the one we are playing with, which is usually called Pathfinder. However I’m going to continue to refer to it as Dungeons and Dragons.And really, that’s all you need to know, join me next week as I chat about creating a campaign and I show you some of my favourite random encounters to come across.